Canon launches cloud-based ‘Irista’, a place to manage your photos

Canon has entered the online storage game with the launch on Thursday of “Irista,” a cloud-based service offering keen snappers a simple way to store and share their images. The service – aimed at owners of all makes of camera – has been in development for several years, finally emerging from the “Project1709” beta version. The new service appears to be aimed initially at Europe-based photographers, with pricing listed in British pounds and Euros.

Its focus on photographers and their images has resulted in what Canon believes to be a functional and efficient online tool. Features include the ability to automatically upload new files to existing collections, powerful sorting features, and easy social integration with Facebook and Flickr. There’s also no restriction on individual file sizes, important for RAW shooters.

The tiled design comes with a customizable timeline and tag-based filtering options to help you find your images quickly using date, location, tags, lens information, and more. In addition, comments on images posted on social media sites can be tracked directly from the irista interface.

“People are taking more photos on more devices than ever before, but it can be difficult to enjoy your images when they’re stored in different places,” Canon Europe’s Alessandro Stanzani said on the company’s website. “With Irista, we’ve created a platform that solves that problem. It’s currently the only service of its type and is built entirely around the needs of the user – reflecting a lot of the feedback received during the beta phase.”

While similar to the likes of competing services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, Irista differs in that it can only be used to hold image files, a limitation that may put off some potential users. It also comes without any editing tools, though with additional features reportedly in development it’s thought likely such functionality will be added in time.

Irista is free if your image collection takes up less than 10GB, while you’ll need to pay £4.49/€4.99 (about $7.50) per month or £45.00/€49.00 ($75) per year for up to 50GB of space, and £9.99/€10.99 ($16.50) per month or £99.00/€109.00 ($165) per year for up to 100GB.

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